Palm Springs Town Facts and Legends: Witch of Tahquitz

In 1919, the Palm Springs sheriff was a young man named Riley. The city was still a sleepy little hamlet before the age of celebrity came upon its doors. The citizens were hard-working people who had learned to live in a harsh climate among a mostly docile tribe of Indians. But there was a shadow lurking over the town and the children disappeared under its cloud. Mostly, the shadow remained over Tahquitz Canyon, hanging there as a warning not to enter. Legend says that when the shadow is in the canyon, everything is safe, because the witch hides in her embrace. But on cloudy days or at night when the shadow is everywhere, you have to be careful, because the witch is out!

In Riley’s story, he is asked to lead a gang into the canyon after the disappearance of an Indian girl who is the daughter of a maid for one of the city’s elite; an early auto mechanic named Zaddie Bunker.

Zaddie gathers a dozen of the town’s leaders at Lykken’s General Store, now a historic site, where each person shares a story about their personal feelings or confrontations with the Witch. Journalist Randall Henderson tells the most gripping story of how, almost 30 years earlier, a little boy had been kidnapped and forced to eat his friend before he could escape. It seems that a generation earlier a gang had formed to capture the Witch, who they thought they had of her, and send her to the notorious Yuma Federal Prison in the middle of the desert wasteland. Unfortunately, the stagecoach he was on never made it and his entire cavalry dragoon escort mysteriously.

So Riley’s gang goes out to catch the witch with half a dozen white settlers, an elderly Indian medicine man (Pedro Chino) and a young Indian named Jesus. Along the way, Pedro tells the boy about previous events in the tribe and his interaction with the Witch. Her name is Mena and she wasn’t always bad. Hundreds of years ago, Spanish explorers had brought it back in their search for gold. She had called on the gods for a chance to escape her and a husband to protect her from her. The mountain god responded, destroying the searching Spanish boats as far north as a primordial Salton Sea in a shower of lightning. She swam to shore and walked slowly towards the tall mountain peak that she could see in the distance and when she saw the canyon and the medicine man Tahquitz who lived there, she knew that she had found his home.

For a long time she and her man helped Cahuilla. But over time, the medicine there turned sour and his most famous spell of sucking the bad out of people began to draw the entire soul out of his patients and, in doing so, prolong their lives. Eventually, Mena tricked and killed Tahquitz, who continues to lie as an eternal spirit of Cahuilla.

The gang eventually reaches her camp and kill her, though not without damaging their own group. One member, Big John, stays behind to watch the Witch’s coals burn, as this is the only true way to know that she is dead. But before she turns to ash, coyotes and other animals scare him away.